This is a challenging project and will appeal to students keen to make a contribution in the areas of scientific databases and geoinformatics.
The NCAR Command Language (NCL) is an interpreted language for scientific data analysis and visualisation ( http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/). NCL is widely-used for the processing of climate data which are held in arrays, generally in a netCDF format ( http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/index.html). rasdaman is an array database system that uses an SQL-style query language to retrieve and maintain unlimited size multi-dimensional arrays stored in standard relational databases ( http://rasdaman.eecs.jacobs-university.de/trac/rasdaman).
This project will load NetCDF climate data into a rasdaman database, and develop an interface to allow its use from NCL commands. It will explore the technical issues that arise, and the benefits and limitations of the rasdaman system and its associated query languages and APIs.
The student will have an opportunity to interact with different specialists as he or she will have access to additional resources and support from the:
- School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, re the provision of climate data, use of NCL, and the identification of a range of example queries and analyses; and,
- Large-Scale Scientific Information Services Research Group, Jacobs University, Bremen, the developers of rasdaman.
This project has a real potential to inform advances in the management and manipulation of large climate data resources, of a type becoming widely used in the continuing exploration of climate science, climate change and its impacts.
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